MacMost: Making the most of your Mac, iPod, Apple TV and iPhone.

Video Transcript (Click to Expand)
    Hi this is Gary Rosenzweig with MacMost Now. Today I want to show you how to send a video email from your Mac.
    So I just came back from the New Media Expo in Las Vegas. And of course, there, surrounded by all sorts of video equipment and people talking about the future of video on the internet I wanted to send an email home. But I thought, wait a minute. Why am I sending an email with text in it? Shouldn’t I be sending video at this point? So I thought, well on a Mac maybe it’s easier than I think. So I looked into how I could send video email from my Mac and it turned out it was very easy. So of course I could have recorded video and edited it like I do this Podcast but I just wanted to send a quick email so I thought is there a program that can allow me to record video very quickly and send it as an email. QuickTime Pro came to mind but not everybody has QuickTime Pro and I wanted a simpler solution. Imovie but then you have to go through a bunch of steps of creating a movie and then exporting it. So I thought, maybe Photo Booth can do this. So I opened up Photo Booth and sure enough you can do exactly this.
    Now to do this in Photo Booth is pretty easy. All you need to do is switch from the photo mode down here to the video mode. You get a video icon, you click it and you get a countdown and then you record your message. ‘Hi. This is a test video email.’ Press it again and it gets added to your little library down here. Click on it and it will play it back for you. Now that you have it selected you can click on the email button over here and it will launch mail and attach the video into a new message. There it is. I just type the to and the subject and I’ve got my video email. So that’s all you need to do to send an email from Photo Booth with a video in it. It’s very easy. But the disadvantage is the file is huge. It doesn’t do any special compression. So in my case I ended up with a 64480 video but it still took just under a meg for four seconds of video. If I wanted to record a longer message it would be huge so I wouldn’t recommend sending these video emails to anybody unless they have a very fast broadband connection.
    Now, alternatively you can go ahead and recompress this movie. If you select it in Photo Booth and do command R to find the original file you can then open up another program. I can do it in QuickTime Pro, for instance. You might have to do it in imovie if you don’t have QuickTime Pro. Imovie’s going to be a little bit harder because you’re actually going to have to construct a movie with just that one clip and then export it. You can also use another program like ffmpeg x for better compression. I sent it as by 320 by 240 H264 movie and I lowered the bit rate to only a hundred kilobits per second which I think was fine for a little video email message. I also took the audio and set that to AAC, which is equivalent to MP3, at 32 kilobits per second so I ended up with only a 64k video which is very acceptable for my four-second video. But that was a lot of extra steps. Alternatively you could have recorded directly in QuickTime Pro or imovie and taken the few extra steps at that point to export a more compact movie.
    Now I hope that in future versions of Photo Booth there’ll be some sort of way to automatically compact your movie into, say, a preset email format which would be similar to what I used. What will even be cooler is if there was an add video option in mail and then you could select that menu item, record a quick little video, it compresses it to a very small size, or maybe something in your preferences and you’ve got a video email. But until then the Photo Booth option’s a pretty good one.
    Until next time, this is Gary Rosenzweig with MacMost Now.

Video Transcript (Click to Expand)
    Hi this is Gary Rosenzweig with MacMost Now, today I want to share with you some of my secrets of video podcasting.
    So, I’ve got fourteen tips to share with you if you’re a video podcaster. Some of these may seem obvious but hopefully they’ll be a little something to help everybody out. Okay so, tip number one is use a real camera. Now, a lot of people that do video podcasting tend to use webcams or the built in eye sight, but there really is no substitute for a real camcorder. It doesn’t have to be super expensive, but a real camcorder has better lenses and better capability to transfer the video to digital. Then you can feed that into your computer, or just record it on to tape and feed it into your computer later. So nowadays everybody wants high definition and it’s cheap to get a HD camera and it works with all editing software, but it can take a lot longer to edit and render video in high definition. So I recommend recording in HD but also doing your editing in standard definition especially if it’s a video podcasting that’s going to end up in standard definition anyway. If you’re going to make an investment in anything it should be in a good mic. Audio is actually the most important part of video. After all, without good audio you can’t understand what the host is saying so the video doesn’t do you any good at all. So get a good quality microphone. A lot of video podcasters are seduced by the coolness of using a green screen, but green screen also can take up a lot of processer power when compiling your video and it’s difficult to get a good effect. I say skip it. Build yourself a set that has something to do with what you are talking about and skip the green screen. Now, lighting is very important for video podcast. Make sure you’re well lit. You should have two lights in front of you and also a light behind you to light up the back of your head. Cheap lights are better than nothing. So go ahead and get yourself a cheap pair of lights. You can get some halogen lights for ten bucks a pop if you can’t afford to have expensive studio lights. With a video podcast I believe it is very important to get feedback from your viewers. So, be sure to communicate with them. Just like I do, post an email address, and also allow people to comment on your website, and check up on the comment if you also post your video podcast to youtube. You should also try to get your viewers involved. You’ve noticed from time to time I do a series of questions as a video podcast. This allows for me to post peoples questions and answer them directly on the podcast. It’s a two way street in video podcasting, it’s not like old media and television where we are just broadcasting out to everybody. You should have an open communication channel and use that as part of your show. Now, sometimes people ask me ‘Where should I distribute my video podcast? Should I put it on places like fliptv? Distribute through itunes? Should I also go with other sites like veoh, viddler, revver? And how about youtube?’ I say do it all. If you’re going to produce a piece of video, go ahead and distribute it everywhere. Sometimes your audiences can be found in different places and they like different websites to go to, to watch their video. So put it everywhere. Another important aspect is to have consistent content. This means, if your show is about certain topic, stick to that topic and don’t go changing to something completely different from one week to the next. You’ll lose subscribers that way. Also be consistent with your schedule. If you disappear for a few weeks only to come back with a few episodes and disappear again you’re just going to lose subscribers. Video podcasting I like to also create what’s called evergreen content. This means that I do a show, say a how to episode, that will be just as interesting a year later as it is on that given day. If you do a show that’s only good for that given day, say about current events, then your episodes won’t have that great a shelf life. You can bet that after a few weeks nobody’s going to watch that video ever again. I find its best to mix it up on a show like MacMost. One mistake I see in a lot of video and audio podcast is there is a lot of dead space. There is a lot of silence. There is a lot of repetitive content. If you try to keep your show tight, then you can get the most information in the least amount of space and you’ll gain and retain subscribers. I see a lot of video podcasts never even get off the ground because the creator wants to make the perfect episode to start with. My advice is just get going. Get your first episode out there and then improve later on. You’ll have plenty of time to get user feedback and figure out new techniques to make your show better and better. So just start. I think the most important tip I give people is to be genuine. Do a show about something you love and be yourself. I love Macs. I like Apple products. And I love talking about them. So doing a show for me is natural. So if you’re going to do a show do it about something you love and be genuine. So there are my fourteen tips for better video podcasting and just like I said I practice what I preach. So if you got a question for me you can email me at questions@MacMost.com. You can also follow me on twitter. Every once in a while I throw out tips like one of these in my twitter account. Till next time this is Gary Rosenzweig with MacMost Now.

Video Transcript (Click to Expand)
    Hi. This is Gary Rosenzweig with MacMost Now. This week I’m going to the New Media Expo in Las Vegas. It’s a conference that’s all about pod casting, so I thought it would be a good opportunity for me to list some of my favorite pod casts so maybe you can discover some that you like. So there’s some pod casts I listen to to keep in touch with what’s going on in tech news, and there’s other ones I listen to for entertainment. The most important pod cast in my week is ‘This Week in Tech’ by Leo Laporte. It’s an audio pod cast that includes a whole bunch of different tech journalist personalities every week talking about the different things going on in the world. Next is GeekBrief with Cali Lewis. This is a video pod cast that shows you all the cool gadgets that have just come out. Sometimes it’s hardware, sometimes its software. I find that if I just watch GeekBrief, I’m up to date on all the latest stuff. Now another great tech news oriented pod cast is Slashdot Review. So host Andy McCaskey is fantastic at not only telling you what the latest tech news is, but explaining things, giving you a little bit of insight into all the new technologies that are happening out there. I find it not only keeps me up to date, but is also fascinating listening. Now another good tech pod cast is net@night. Net@night is another Leo Laporte pod cast, and it’s actually hosted by Leo Laporte and Amber MacArthur. It specializes in web 2.0 stuff, pointing out a lot of cool links to cool new websites. They also have interviews with some of the founders of web 2.0 companies. I also listen to some pod casts that are for music. First I listen to The Chillcast with Anji Bee. Every week she presents a cool set of chill music that is always great to listen to. In addition, I also listen to USA Today’s Pop Candy. Whitney Mathison covers pop culture for USA Today in her blog. Her pod cast usually includes a lot of cool new music as well. A lot of people watch Walstrip, a video pod cast about Wall Street for information. I watch it for entertainment. I’m not really that interested in investing in a lot of companies, but I find it’s really cool to find out about these companies in an entertaining way. There’s always a good dose of humor with every video pod cast. A short little pod cast I listen to just about every week is Grammar Girl. Now Grammar Girl puts out a lot of cool tips about writing. For instance, how to use its vs. it’s, how to use hyphens, that type of thing. So it’s always good to spend five minutes learning how to write a little bit better. Now, of course, I also watch a lot of video pod casts that are purely for entertainment purposes, things that have been around for awhile like, ‘Ask a Ninja,’ or ‘Tiki Bar TV.’ If you search all around in iTunes, you’ll find that there’s a pod cast for just about every interest. So go take a look, subscribe to some pod casts, and give them a try. Till next time, this is Gary Rosenzweig with MacMost Now.

Video Transcript (Click to Expand)
    Hi this is Gary. On today’s episode of MacMost Now let’s take a look at how to video podcast.
    While Apple treats audio and video podcasting in much the same way for the end user, you get them through iTunes and you can watch or listen to them on youri iPod and iPhone, but if you’re producing them video podcasting is a very different thing.
    Now if you’re doing a video podcast, of course you’re going to have to record video. You can do this through a video camera in two ways; one way is to record directly onto the tape or hard drive of the video camera. The other way is to record through the video camera onto the computer through a firewire interface. To do that you’re going to need a piece of software on your computer to record the video, and you can use iMovies if you like or a more complex piece of software is Final Cut. Both of these of course will allow you to edit as well. I use a specialty piece of software, called WireCast from Vera Software, that allows me to record video and to add things like these titles later on if I want to during the recording. Then latter on I take it into iMovie for editing. So then you have to take your whole video and edit it down. You can do that in all those different programs, but no matter what you use you’re going to make sure that you export your final product into a format that can be used on the iPod. Now for instance, in iMovie we’ve got right here a different set of settings when you just say share and export and you have tiny, mobile, medium, and large. You can go ahead and select medium which will optimize it for iPod, and even though it says not for iPhone it is actually optimized for iPhone as well and it will play back on iPhone it’s just not optimized for mobile playback on iPhone. And that same thing will work on Apple tv, computers, and also on YouTube, another place you may want to upload your video podcast to.
    Now once you have your video you want to go ahead and create a podcast blog in much the same way as I suggested in the previous episode of MacMost for audio podcasts. Now for video podcasts you have to worry about where to store the video because these files can be pretty large and if you store them on a regular web host you can get hit with big bandwidth charges. One place I love to use is blip.tv so at blip.tv you can host your video and do it for free or rather inexpensively depending upon what you choose. And also it can create the blog for the podcast automatically, including an RSS feed that you can send right to iTunes. So check them out. The other places you may want to host your video of course are YouTube, but you can’t host a podcast there you can. only host the web video there. But there are plenty of other sites that you can do it through as well, so you want to shop around and find out what works best for you.
    Once you’ve got that done, you want to submit to iTunes. iTunes is definitely the number one place where people find pod casts. So you want to sign into your iTunes account, add a podcast, submit your RSS feed and then have iTunes pick it up. At this point you’re also going to want to make sure that you have really nice icons and things that look good compared to the other podcasts in your category in iTunes.
    I’ll be doing an episode later this week on some of my secrets of podcasting, for tips once you get going. I’ll also be attending the New Media Expo in Vegas this week, so if you’re there look for me or you can follow my activities at the conference at my twitter account, twitter.com/ Gary Rosenzweig. Until next time this is Gary Rosenzweig with MacMost Now.

Video Transcript (Click to Expand)
    Hi. This is Gary with MacMost now. On this episode, let’s talk about how you can go ahead and make your own podcast. There are a lot of steps involved in podcasting, and there are a lot of different ways to do it, and different systems that support it. So, let’s talk about it in very general terms, and hopefully, I’ll give you enough information to get started.
    You follow the same basic techniques for audio and video podcasting, but let’s focus on audio podcasting. Audio podcasting is a lot more predominant, and it’s a lot easier to produce. The first thing to realize is that a podcast is really just a blog. It’s a blog with something called “enclosures.” These are links to external pieces of media, such as an audio file. So, the first thing you need to do to set up a podcast is to set up a blog. You can do this many places for free. For instance blogger.com, wordpress.com, a lot of times your own ISP will provide a blogging interface, or, if you’re tech savvy, you can go ahead and download some software like wordpress, and install it on your own website and create a blog that way. Any way you do it, the important thing to do is to establish a normal, regular blog first. But it’s always a good idea to use your own domain name. So whatever system you use, make sure that you can buy your own domain name, and assign it to your blog. that way you’re in complete control of the location of your new podcast.
    The next step is to record your podcast. Garage Band is a great choice. In fact, it even has a podcasting mode. When you create a new document, you can select a podcast. You can look in the help for Garage Band for tips on recording a podcast on Garage Band. Once you have that setup, you want to make sure you have a really good microphone. This is very important. Don’t use the internal microphone in your MAC, as there’s too much noise created from your machine to make that a really good sound input. So, you want to buy a microphone, probably with a USB interface. USB will allow you to plug it right into your MAC. The MAC doesn’t have a microphone input, it has a line in jack which doesn’t work directly with microphones. But, you can get USB headsets for $10, $20, or $30. You can get better microphones for about $100. But it is definitely very important to have a good microphone.
    Garage Band has a whole bunch of different settings for improving the quality of the audio. And you can also overlay a little bit of music at the beginning and end of your podcast. And you can copy and paste bits, like an opening or ending to your podcast to use every week.
    Once you’ve completed your podcast in Garage Band, you can use the share function to export it as an mp3 file. Once you have an mp3 file, that’s all you need to upload it to use it in your podcast. Now, the trick is to find a place to upload it. If you’ve got a regular website where you can upload files, or you have a mobile ME account, it’s very easy to go and put the mp3 file there. But you can find lots of other services, hosts, that will allow you to place your mp3 file on them. So now you should have your blog, you should have your mp3 file ready for your first episode. All you need to do is connect the two.
    So a blog post and a podcast episode are basically the same thing. The difference is an enclosure. An enclosure is basically a link, in a blog post, to an external media file, like this mp3 file. Now, once you have that enclosure, that link, podcatchers, like itunes, will know that that post has an audio file associated with it, and will treat it as a podcast. Now it depends on what system you’re using as to how you create this link. For instance, in Blogger, theres a way to add a link to a blog post. You can do this different ways in different systems. Some will even allow you to upload your file. So, you can basically upload it and store it in the same place as your blog.
    You should then be able to go view your blog and see that there’s an mp3 attachment to that blog post. The blog post, of course, should be the description of your episode. If you click on that mp3 link, you should actually hear the episode play in your web browser. Once you’ve got that set up, you know you are ready to go actually make this podcast.
    So what you need now is to find out the RSS feed for your blog. This depends on the system you’re using, but it should be easy to poke around and find out the RSS feed for your blog. This is what you need to submit to various sites to tell people that you have a podcast, or to email people directly and say, “Hey! subscribe to my podcast!” Or to even link to it on your website and saying, “Hey, click here to subscribe.” Also, you probably want to submit it to itunes. If you go into itunes and log into your itunes account, you can add a podcast. Just give it your RSS feed and it will go ahead and categorise and add that podcast to itunes so others can find it.
    Alternatively you can use Feedburner (Feedburner.com) which is a Google service that will take your RSS feed and allow you to easily customize it and make it into a better podcast by adding all kinds of categories, tags, and icons.
    And that’s it. I realize this was a very basic tutorial, it didn’t go into detail. So, if you really want to do this and you’re having trouble, just search the web. There’s tons of site to help you set up your own podcast. And if you are doing a video podcast, it’s even easier because there are a lot of sites that help you. We’ll talk about that in the next episode.
    Now, at the end of this week, I’ll be at the new media expo. That’s a conference in Las Vegas that’s all about podcasting. If you’re there, be sure to look for me. You can contact me by email (questions@MacMost.com) or you can also follow my twitter feed. (twitter.com/garyrosenzweig) I’m sure I’ll be putting out lots of tweets during the conference. Till next time, this is Gary Rosenzweig at MacMost now.
    Also, if your microphone takes a battery, make sure it’s good before recording. This one is going, as you can probably tell.

Video Transcript (Click to Expand)
    Hi this is Gary Rosenzweig with MacMost Now.
    Let me show you how to connect your Mac to your XBox 360.
    So one of the cool features about the XBox 360 is the ability to play back media such as music, movies and photos from your local pc. PC as in a Windows PC. But have no fear, there’s also a way to play back all of the stuff from your Mac as well.
    To do this you’re going to need to get a special piece of software called connect 360. You can get it from nullriver.com. It costs twenty bucks but there’s a free trial version so you can see exactly how it works before you purchase. Once you download it, it’s a preference pane, so it installs in your preferences and it instantly finds everything you’ve got in your iTunes, iPhoto and movies folders. It tells you how many things it finds and lets you set some settings as well.
    Next thing you need to do is then turn on your XBox 360. Now of course, you’re going to have to have your Xbox 360 and your Mac hooked up to the same wireless network. If you don’t, all bets are off. There’s probably a way to get it to work by routing things through the right routers but it’s going to be a lot more complex. If they’re on the same router though, it should work easily.
    So as soon as I turned on the Xbox 360 it instantly appeared on discovered devices. It even made a neat sound to tell me it was connected even though I was in the other room when I turned the 360 on. I did have to quit the game that was running and go back to the dashboard before it happened but now the xbox 360 sees all these files. Let’s take a look.
    So here I am at my xbox 360 and I need to go over to the Media section and I see there’s music, pictures and videos. I click on music and sure enough, there are the albums from my iTunes collection at my Mac. I can go ahead and select one and play.
    I can go back and look at the photos. I can even do a slide show if I want. It also has videos, including the podcasts that were downloadedand in iTunes on my machine.
    “Hi, this is Gary. Today on MacMost Now, let’s take a look at how…”
    So, this is great way to get the content from your Mac onto a tv using xbox 360. Kind of works just like an apple tv actually.
    I’m really impressed with how easy the connect 360 software is to install and use. It really just worked automatically. Now not all movies play back on the xbox 360 and of course music files that are protected on the ac format are not going to play back either but it’s a great solution if you don’t have an apple tv but you have an xbox 360 in your living room and you wanna connect your mac to it and watch some videos and play some music and show the family the photos.
    Until next time, this is Gary Rosenzweig with MacMost Now.

Video Transcript (Click to Expand)
    Hi, this is Gary Rosenzweig with MacMost Now. Today I’m going to show you how to find large files on your macs hard drive so you can clean it up. When my hard drive starts to get full the first thing I suspect is that there are a couple very large files there that I probably don’t need. So I go looking for these large files as a quick way to free up some space. Now there are several ways to do this. One is I go ahead and look in some usual locations where some large files are stored. Another is to search, either using the finder or the terminal, for some large files. There’s also a lot of shareware applications out there that will help you find large files.
    Looking for large files on the hard drive, there are a couple of usual suspects. The first thing I do is I go to my primary user directory and then I can view all the subdirectories in it. Then I look in places like “movies” and I look to see if there’s any imovie events or imovie projects. Maybe it was somethig that I finished up months ago and don’t really mean to be lying around. And of course if I do need it sometimes I’ll archive it to a cd or dvd before deleting it. Another place to look of course is the music folder. Maybe you have got a lot of music. Maybe you have just converted a bunch of cds to mp3 files and you no longer need them around on the drive or you want to archive them and move them out. Same thing with pictures. You may have a lot of different pictures or you may have stored a lot of different movies from your regular photo camera in the pictures folder and you can archive and get rid of them.
    So I check all those places and of course I look also on the desktop in documents to see if anything catches my eye. The next thing I do is a search for large files. So I usually press command “F” to go right to search mode and then I change what I’m searching for. I actually go and change the kind to “other” and I choose from a long list of different things that you can select and I look for size. And I hit “Ok.” So I am going to do size and I change it to “is greater than” and something in terms of megabytes. Maybe I check for 100 megabytes. And it will search this mac for files that are that big.
    Now you can also click on here to search for the current folder you’re looking on. So maybe it would be useful to actually go and click on your user folder before doing this and then we will find only these large files that are in the user folder. After all that’s probably where these are going to be. Any large files that are outside of that are probably in the applications folder and you probably do not want to get rid of them and you’re just going to waste a lot of time searching for them in the finder. Once you find some of these files, you can actually click on them, do command “I” to bring up a window and it will tell you how large that file is. And then you can go ahead right from there select them and do command delete to put them in the trash. Or of course you could archive them first and then delete them.
    Now you can also do this with terminal. So in the terminal window the command you want to use is “find.” And you want to use “find” and then the path you want to start looking in. So “/users/MacMost/” to look in my user directory. Then “-size” to tell it you want to find files of a certain size. A “+” symbol to say greater than this size and then I put in “2000000″ for anything bigger than 2 megabytes approximately. And I come up with a quick list of files. See how fast that was compared to searching the other way. And then you get the full path names. If you are good in terminal you can actually go and find these files right here and remove them or you can go to the finder and find them that way.
    Now there are also some shareware applications that will help you find large files or determine what folders on your drive take up a lot of space. For instance you can go ahead and download Disk Inventory X at derlien.com. You can also download What Size at id-design.com. Another one is Grand Perspectiv which is an open source project (grandperspectiv.sourceforge.net). And then finally we’ve got Omni Disksweeper from the omnigroup.com.
    Here’s what you get when you run Grand Perspectiv for instance. You get these big blocks that tell you which folders take up a lot of space. This is that very large file that I’ve got, I can instantly see that it’s there. I can also look ahead and see some of the other large ones, some smaller ones that take up some space. It’s a really quick way to get a visual picture of what is on your hard drive. That’s a quick look on how to find large files on your hard drive so you can clear them off and make some space. Until next time this is Gary Rosenzweig with MacMost Now.

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Video Transcript (Click to Expand)
    Hi, this is Gary Rosenzweig with MacMostNow. Today I’m going to show you how to block some unwanted text messages on your iPhone. So a lot of iPhone users in the US have upgraded to the new plan and have opted not to have any allowance for SMS messages. This means they are not paying the extra 5 dollars to get the 200 text messages they originally got for free every month. Now what this means is they have to pay twenty cents for every text messages. That’s both messages they sent and messages they receive. One of the problems with that is, people can send you SMS messages and you have to pay for it. Now, of course, one way to stop this is tell your friend: “”Hey, don’t text message me”". But, there is a catch. If somebody knows your phone number, they can figure out your AT&T text message email address and they can actually send you an email that will end up as a text message on your phone. Matter of fact, this is a way that spammers are now sending out their messages, they are sending now to random or a list of cell phone numbers, and you get them as an SMS message, and in that case you are paying 20 cents for every message you get, even if it’s spam. Fortunately, there’s a way to turn this off, but its not wholly publiced. So the place you need to go is “”mymessages.wirelles.att.com”". Now, you’re going to need your phone number and a password. This is a separate account from your standard AT&T account, so you may need to set it up the first time. They’re going to send you a text message (you don’t have to pay for that, because it comes from AT&T), then you confirm and you have an account at this subsite of AT&T. Once you do that, you can log in and go to “”blocking options”". They have several options. One is you can block all text messages sent to his mail. This is how spammers get to you, so this is the one you want to check off. Another is you can block all Multimedia messages sent to his email, so check those both off, if you’d like. Another option is, you can set up this alias, in another words, set up a different email address, and people can actually send you text messages by emailing that alias. if you do so, then you can just simply block getting text messages via an email using your phone number. now, this is how the spammers, so this might be a good alternative if you need somebody to be abler to text message you through email. set up an alias, and then block everybody else from sending it to you using your phone number as an email address. so once you’ve set this up, you can also do block lists. So say if, you’re still getting some spam from some spammer that’s actually sending text messages from a text message device, like another cell phone, you can actually block them or you could also allow certain email addresses to send to you. so you got to a bunch of options there. of course the purpose of allowing a specific email address is if you want to block everybody else, but you want to allow you’re spouse or best friend to be able to do it. this way you can turn it on. so this is even useful even if you have an sms messaging plan, but you want to make sure that you’re not getting any spam. now if you’re having a serious problem with sms spam, or you want to make sure you never have that problem, you can call AT&T and request that they turn sms messaging completely on your account. reports are AT&T is one of the companies that allows you to do this, though I haven’t tried it myself. until next time, this is Gary Rosenzweig with MacMostNow.

Video Transcript (Click to Expand)
    Hi. This is Gary with MacMost Now. Today I’m going to show you how to use QuickTime Pro to edit your own video.
    So iMovie’s a great tool for making videos but QuickTime Pro actually has some really interesting features that can be a little easier to use at times. Let’s go and take a look at how to make a really simple video with a title and some music at the beginning and then a few video clips put together after that.
    So let’s gather the media first. Say I’ve got three video clips. Clip one, two and three. You could have gotten these from anywhere. Maybe you used your regular camera in movie mode to record them. You’ll end up with three movie files. It can handle formats of just about any kind; mp4, h264, anything. These came out as dot mob’s. So I’ve got three movie clips. I also want to have a little intro so I’ve created a graphic called Title. You can create this is any kind of image editing program; you can even just type some text into text edit and then do a screen capture of it.
    So you have a graphic that you want to use in your title and also your piece of music. I grabbed this piece of music out of my garage band library where it’s got lots of short little jingles and things like that. So I’ve got a piece of music, title graphic and three video clips and I want to put that together in a simple video using QuickTime Pro.So I’m going to go ahead and run QuickTime Pro and I want to go and just basically say New Player and I get this blank timeline called Untitled, there’s nothing in it right now.
    So first thing I want to do is I’m going to go ahead and open the music and I’m going to do that in QuickTime Player. So I’m going to Control click on it and open with so it doesn’t open in iTunes. So now I’ve got two QuickTime Player windows; this one here with the music in it and this untitled one. Do Command A to select all, Copy. Then I’m going to go over here and I’m going to paste and what I get is the music pasted into this blank document. I also get the entire area selected automatically, you can see the start and the end and you can also see that the playback head is right at the end now and the entire thing is a kind of a little darker meaning it’s selected. I’m going to leave that selected and I want to go and get the next thing so I want to close this video here, the audio only video, and I’m going to right click on the picture and I’m going to open that also with QuickTime Player and I end up with just basically it’s a single frame movie with this image in it. I’m going to go ahead and I’m going to Select All, Copy again. I’m going to go back into this window, which is the document I’m trying to create, and I’m going to paste it in. But not just a regular paste. I’m going to select actually Add Selection and Scale. What that’ll do is it’ll paste this in and scale it to the size of the area selected; so we have this piece of music that’s so long and it’s actually going to actually paste this in and stretch it to be the same amount of time as the piece of music. Great. So now I’ve got this right here and it’s actually scaled to be thirteen seconds long. And I can play it and see. Great.
    So I’m going to move the playback head all the way to the end again so I’m ready to insert the next piece. Now for these video clips it’s very easy. All I’m going to do is I’m going to double click on them which will open them up in QuickTime Player and I’m going to go ahead and Command A for all, Command C for copy, go over here, make sure my playback head is at the end, and paste it in. I can see now I’ve pasted it in and it’s selected it, so it’s this bit at the end, and it’s moved the playback head all the way to the end there. I’m going to do that for the other two clips as well. Paste it in, select it, copy it and paste it in. So now I’ve got a video here that starts off with the music, goes all the way through, starts my first video, goes to the second video and the third video. And if I like I can actually paste the title graphic or a new graphic at the end as well. So I can go ahead here and select the music…

Video Transcript (Click to Expand)
    Hi. This is Gary. You know, I get asked a lot about iChat. It seems to use iChat you need to have an account with something, either AOL or dot Mac or something like that. And that’s true but you don’t have to pay for it. If you want you can sign up for an AOL Instant Messenger account for free and use that with iChat. Let me show you how on this episode of MacMost Now.
    So there are actually five different ways to chat with iChat. The first is to use Bonjour which is the internal networking inside your company or home and you can set up iChat up for that. But if you want to chat to everybody else on the Internet you’re going to have to use one of four different methods. One is a dot Mac account which of course costs an annual fee. Another one is to use AOL Instant Messenger which is free. Also free are Jabber and Google Talk accounts. Let’s go ahead and look at how to set up an AOL Instant Messenger account because it’s the one it seems you can set it up without having to set up a whole other account. Now if you already have a Google account you can already use that as your Google Talk interface to iChat. So you’re already set. Same thing for Jabber. But if you want to do AOL here’s a quick way to set it up.
    So to create an AOL Instant Messenger screen name all you need to do is go to aim.com and it will redirect you to a page where you can go ahead and install the AOL Instant Messenger. That’s not what we want to do. We want to click over here at the first tab and click on get a screen name. That’ll take us to another window that will allow us to create an account and we go ahead and fill out this form. And there we go. We’ve got a screen name here that we can go ahead and use and remember the password. Okay, so now over to iChat. To launch iChat you go to the iChat preferences window, you come up with a window like this and you click on accounts and click on the plus sign at the bottom left. And you can go ahead and add one of the different type of accounts. So add AIM account, which stands for AOL Instant Messenger, type your new screen and password and then type done. Now it’ll go ahead and log you on there with AOL Instant Messenger. Now you can go ahead and tell all your friends your i.d. at AOL Instant Messenger and they can chat with you using AOL Instant Messenger, using iChat or using any system compatible with AOL Instant Messenger which is a lot. And likewise if you sign up for Google or Jabber you can chat on those systems as well as chatting on iChat.
    Now one of the coolest things about iChat is the ability to use video and audio chat. Audio makes the chat just like a phone call and video makes it like, well, just like a video phone call. So you can do this using the AOL Instant Messenger account and you can actually do it with somebody who’s on AOL as well as somebody else that has a Mac with iChat. It’s really easy to get two Macs hooked up and video chatting between them. It’s a little bit harder to get a Mac talking with a non-Mac but it’s doable and I’ve done it before. So check out those features now that you have a AIM account or Google account or Jabber account and go ahead and see if instant messenging is for you.
    Until next time this is Gary Rosenzweig with MacMost Now.